Back in 2006, when I was carrying a Mac laptop around town while I reported on various stories, I saw and quickly signed up to use Undercover, a service made it possible to track and locate your computer if it were to be stolen.

We loaded Undercover on several generations of laptops, and would get regular reports letting us know that they were still being actively tracked.

Then came the sudden announcement from Undercover’s parent company, Orbicule, that their service would shut down on January 1, 2020.

What led to the end of Undercover makes for kind of an interesting story.

This is from the company’s blog:

Why are we halting Undercover development

The main reason is that over the past 6 years, Apple has significantly increased security on macOS. While that’s a good thing in general, it makes it increasingly more difficult to reliably run hidden software like Undercover.

Another key point is that FileVault has become mainstream. This means that a thief won’t be able to access your files without your password – again a good thing. However, this also means that Undercover won’t be able to function properly, as third party developers don’t have access to the recovery partition that is being used when a thief boots your Mac without knowing your password. Only Apple has access to this recovery partition, where it can run FindMyMac.
Undercover (or any other third party application) can’t run on this recovery partition and will be useless if FileVault has been enabled.

A third reason is that with macOS Catalina, Apple is refreshing its FindMyMac app (now called FindMy) and will leverage its large installed base of Macs and iPhones to track stolen devices, even if they never connect to the internet. They do so by using Bluetooth connections of nearby devices that are connected to the internet. Again a great idea from Apple, but Undercover or any other third party application, do not have access to this functionality.

When launched in January 2006, Undercover was groundbreaking software. The fact that Apple has replicated Undercover-like functionality and embedded it deep into iOS and macOS shows the value of the theft-recovery genre that Undercover has pioneered. At this point, however, we feel that we can no longer deliver reliable software due to security restrictions, while having a hard time carving out a successful business model competing with free Apple software that is installed by default on every Mac and has access to system features that we can only dream of.

We’re proud of the literally thousands of stolen Macs that have been recovered thanks to Undercover. We’re also proud of the fact that Undercover helped bringing a little bit of justice in a world that’s often unfair. Undercover even provided critical evidence to arrest a drug gang.

We would like to thank you, as a user, for your continued support over the past 14 years. It has been a great journey!

– The Undercover Team